Our Virginia: 2022 Impact Report

Our Virginia mountains were once the American frontier. Indigenous peoples, of course, stewarded the Appalachians for millennia. But it wasn’t until the lead-up to the American Revolution that Daniel Boone set out from his home along Virginia’s Clinch River to begin opening the Wilderness Road into Kentucky.

In a sense, history has come full circle, as our Appalachian region is gaining recognition as a new frontier in conservation. This time, it’s global climate change rousing our revolutionary spirit. Such an all-encompassing threat requires us to declare independence from past thinking and to reimagine our strategies for conquering 21st century environmental challenges.

That’s why The Nature Conservancy ventured into uncharted territory in 2019 with our quarter-million-acre Cumberland Forest acquisition. TNC’s Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee chapters; our NatureVest division; and outside impact investors forged a unique alliance to pursue a shared vision of positive change across this vast swath of Appalachia.

It’s extremely gratifying that, this fall, a National Geographic magazine cover story highlights Cumberland Forest as one of four projects representing the leading edge of conservation. As the article states, traditional conservation of preserves and public lands has produced extraordinary results. But in the face of climate change, conservation must engage everywhere.

Moreover, the article goes on to say, “You have to make conservation pay better than destruction.” We’re seeing this theory of change play out—and pay off—in the Cumberland Forest. We see it in the elk herd that’s thriving on former minelands. In our partnerships to generate solar energy from other minelands. And in the local community entrepreneurs whose nature-based ventures we’re supporting.

In fact, as the examples in this report show, we’re seeing conservation pay off across Virginia, from the Appalachians to our Atlantic barrier islands. Your support makes Virginia a conservation leader. We deeply appreciate your commitment to a brighter future for nature and people.

Roaring Springs Preserve, donated to TNC by Fitz Gary, fits into a mosaic of conservation lands stretching from Highland County into West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. Astrophotographer Brennan Gilmore describes the experience of visiting this dark-sky area, ideal for stargazing, and capturing this image. 

For hours I familiarized myself with the property, parting the grass seas, climbing the steep valley walls, and wading up to my waist in muddy water. Somehow I managed to get down the valley to the field of boneset and ironweed flowers I had identified earlier in the day as my primary shooting location. Once in place, I shot for nearly an hour. While the camera took five-minute exposures, I lay on the ground, staring up at the heavens and listening to beavers swim and slap the water in the nearby pond. They certainly seemed as happy as I was to be there.

I absolutely love history and telling stories, specifically those of the underrepresented. So having a chance to focus on lands and lives, exploring stories and conditions through the lens of place, was incredibly interesting to me. I had two major projects over the course of the summer. One was [documenting] the historical Indigenous presence in the places that TNC protects within Virginia.

I am also working on an article that explores the complex relationship that the African American community has with nature—and misunderstandings of that relationship. Often, it seems that people both outside and inside the community feel that nature (and therefore conservation) is not for Black Americans, but through the examination of our past, we can find quite quickly that nature has been an underlying part of oppression and freedom, serving as a canvas for our story.

My highlight was getting to visit the Eastern Shore of Virginia—an amazing opportunity to meet other interns, get closer with my team, and learn more about the historical contexts of the Brownsville Preserve.

Science communication, and specifically bilingual science communication, is very important to me. The big community engagement event I planned was for Latino Conservation Week, a nationwide event from the Hispanic Access Foundation that aims to get more Latino and Spanish-speaking people out in nature. We held a picnic lunch and bilingual wagon rides on July 23 at Brownsville Preserve and just encouraged people to come out to the trail with their families and enjoy nature.

So many people out there would greatly benefit from learning about the work TNC is doing and simply being outdoors and enjoying nature. But a huge portion of them is being missed due to things like language barriers. Since TNC is a global organization, I think it’s a natural next step to consider communicating its work beyond the people they have historically been reaching.

In making an effort to meet community members where they are, I think more people will be able to decide for themselves what they would like nature and conservation to mean, and that’s a choice that everyone deserves to be able to make.

This historical research included both of my passions, environmental stewardship and diversifying the conservation world. It also was an opportunity to understand and contextualize my own family history, as I have ancestors that have been on the Eastern Shore since the early 1800s.

My role is to uncover the overlooked history of enslaved and freed African American individuals who were members of the Brownsville and Nassawadox communities. Some may view Brownsville as just a historic site, but it was more than just a home. It was a plantation owned by the Upshur family, and, as such, it has a complicated and difficult history of enslavement and inequity built into its foundation.

It is my responsibility to fill in the gaps of knowledge about the first stewards of this land: the enslaved laborers and their descendants. I have created a family tree of approximately 80 enslaved people living in Brownsville between 1782 and 1855.

This internship has shown me that there are people-focused careers in conservation, and it has strengthened my resolve to diversify this field.

11-year-old Kai shares his experience as an eelgrass volunteer.

We drove an hour and a half north up to the Eastern Shore to a remote area. Once we got there we suited up in wetsuits and got on one of two boats. On the way out there, we got a class on eelgrass and the history of the estuary. 

The water was above my knees, almost to my waist. Nice shallow waters with many creatures to be found. It was very calm. Floating through the shallow water above the eelgrass was such a peaceful and calm place with all kinds of sea life. I found knobbed whelks, silverside fish and small mud crabs, four live whelks and a few hermit crabs. 

I also found a toadfish hiding inside a whelk shell and a bunch of scallops—did you know that if you take a scallop out of the water for a bit, it slowly opens its mouth and then snaps shut! I also learned the little blue dots around the rim of their shell are actually eyes and that they can push themselves through the water with their ductor muscle. 

It’s a simple task to pick out the seeds from the flat grass, but I did get majorly distracted by the sea life!

This experience was awesome. It was like swimming through an abyss of underwater grasses with sea life everywhere you look. Sometimes you find yourself so focused that you forget about the outside world or even what you are supposed to be doing. Time flew by very fast even though this journey was only a few hours long.

The group collected a total of 25 bags of eelgrass seeds, which were dumped into big tanks where they combined them with collections from previous days. I learned that the seeds will pop out of the shoots and the grasses will decompose.

As it decomposes, the oxygen gets used up, but the seeds do better with oxygen, so they stir the tanks every day. By early July the seeds are all popped out, so they skim the leftover grasses off the top, and the seeds drop to the bottom. They will move the seeds to smaller tanks, where they control the temperature so they don’t sprout yet. In October they will throw the seeds out in the areas that need more eelgrasses and then check back in March and hope it grew!

Everyone can do something every day to help the environment. It can be as easy as picking up trash and not littering. But if you can volunteer, it is a good way to meet people while having fun, learning something new and making a difference. This was a really awesome experience, and if you go, I hope you will enjoy it too!